Steve Blank
JULY 11, 2017
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I was visiting with an ex-student who’s now the CFO of a large public tech company. The company is still one of the hottest places to work in tech. They make hardware with a large part of their innovation in embedded software and services.
YoungUpstarts
AUGUST 25, 2017
Artificial intelligence is increasingly making inroads into different areas of our lives. Many of the current and proposed uses for artificial intelligence are things that only a short time ago would have sounded right at home in speculative science fiction. As more and more of these seemingly magical uses of artificial intelligence come to be realized, there is also an increasing awareness developing of just how much we can achieve with truly intelligent machines and pieces of software.
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Up and Running
OCTOBER 9, 2017
This article is part of our “ Business Planning Guide “ —a curated list of our articles that will help you with the planning process! Conducting a SWOT analysis of your business is a lot more fun than it sounds. It won’t take much time, and doing it forces you to think about your business in a whole new way. The point of a SWOT analysis is to help you develop a strong business strategy by making sure you’ve considered all of your business’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as the op
Occam's Razor
MARCH 30, 2017
A rare post today. It looks a little further out into the future than I normally tend to. It attempts to simplify a topic that has more than it’s share of coolness, confusion and complexity. While the phrase Artificial Intelligence has been around since the first human wondered if she could go further if she had access to entities with inorganic intelligence, it truly jumped the shark in 2016.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
ConversionXL
MAY 11, 2017
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” —Napoleon Bonaparte. When your competitors make mistakes, it makes winning so much easier. But what if it’s you who is making a mistake, while your competitors are off to the races? You won’t know until you figure out what your competitors are up to. Knowing what the competitors are doing – how they are thinking about the market, what tactics they are using, how they are crafting messages and design – can make all the differen
Growthink Blog
DECEMBER 27, 2017
Are you looking to raise venture capital ? You need a good idea – and an excellent business plan. Business planning and raising venture capital go hand-in-hand. A business plan is required for attracting venture capital. And the desire to raise capital (whether from an individual “angel” investor or a venture capital firm) is often the key motivator in the business planning process.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Hearpreneur
JANUARY 29, 2017
Share André Gide wrote that,”Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” Quotes are an important part of motivation, though many of them are repeats of another turn of phrase. Business owners are particularly partial to famous quotations. Reading a motivational speech from a business legend or famous creative mind can give you a spark.
Hunter Walker
JANUARY 2, 2017
When the WSJ and the NYTimes write the same trend story you can assume it’s a narrative that is being pushed by people who want it to be true! And the narrative for 2017 is OLD ECONOMY COMPANIES WANT TO BUY YOUR STARTUP. So, is it true? Largely yes, but the pot of gold might be more modest than some of 2016’s notable transactions suggest (Jet, Cruise, Dollar Shave Club).
VC Adventure
AUGUST 31, 2017
If you read my blog regularly you know I love (LOVE) metrics. So no surprise that when River Cities Capital released an overview of SaaS operating and valuation benchmarks, I hung on every juicy detail. It’s chocked full of them – I’d highly recommend your reading the full report. But if you’re too busy for that, below are some of the key take-aways.
Duct Tape Marketing
OCTOBER 12, 2017
How to Optimize Your Event Marketing Campaigns: Before, During and After Events written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Frost and Sullivan report that the live events industry is worth around $512 billion. Alon Alroy, CMO of Bizzabo, explains how event marketers can measure and optimize their event marketing campaigns before during and after the event process.
Steve Blank
MARCH 15, 2017
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup. His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing. All good news.
YoungUpstarts
JUNE 5, 2017
by Brian Zeng, owner of Ponbee.com. “We spend as much as half our days in meetings.” – ‘ State of Modern Meeting ’ by Blue Jeans Network. It is therefore essential for business owners to think of ways to make meetings more productive and reduce the time spent in the conference rooms. This will not only ensure higher productivity and better efficiency within the organization, but the employees will be better engaged.
Up and Running
AUGUST 8, 2017
I’ve had a 30-year love-hate relationship with mission statements. I’ve read thousands. I love it when a mission statement defines a business so well that it feels like strategy —which does happen—and I hate it when a mission statement is generic, stale, and completely useless. Which also happens, but not nearly as often. What is a mission statement?
Occam's Razor
JANUARY 31, 2017
Ten years, and the 944,357 words, are proof that I love purposeful data, collecting it, pouring smart strategies into analyzing it, and using the insights identified to transform organizations. In the quest for that last important bit, I am insanely obsessive about 1. simplification and 2. pressing the right emotional buttons. The reasons are that we all like complexity, it gives us energy :), we tend to be logical, and we often treat data output as the end when in reality the data output is jus
ConversionXL
AUGUST 23, 2017
Customer journey mapping is a widely used and impactful technique that can help you make better product, marketing, UX, and merchandising decisions. However, like other UX research techniques (including user personas ), there’s some vagueness and obscurity around how to actually create customer journey maps. This article will draw processes and customer journey mapping examples from experts in the field, and you’ll hopefully walk away with a real and clear picture of how to do it on
Both Sides of the Table
FEBRUARY 15, 2017
Upfront Ventures was created 20 years ago as one of the original VC funds in Los Angeles. Back then only 15% of our dollars were invested locally whereas today 50% of our dollars are invested in LA. 10 years ago we found ourselves trying to persuade LPs and VCs that it was worth spending more time getting to know the LA market and now the most common refrain that I hear from them is “there really is something going on in LA.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
OCTOBER 17, 2017
Forget work/life integration for a minute. How much time do you have, regardless of partitioning? From your 24-hour daily allotment, the 1950s-style break-down is 8 hours for work, 8 for home and commute, and 8 for sleep and ablutions. So, “work” and “home” are the two things in which you can spend 40+ hours per week. This is the amount of time it takes to tackle something huge.
Hearpreneur
JUNE 10, 2017
Music can change your spirit. If you’re having a bad day and listen to your favorite song, it can change your entire mood. Music can also help you to get through difficult moments in life. One of the hardest things anyone can ever do is start and run a business. We knew that entrepreneurs have the best playlists and we decided to ask them their favorite tracks. #1 – All I do is Win by DJ Khaled.
Gust
DECEMBER 17, 2017
It’s that time of year when we’re all staring down the end of the December, wondering where the months have gone. This is also the time when a lot of entrepreneurs wrestle with their plans for the next year, asking themselves: Where should I bet big? Are the growth targets right? How am I going to pay for all these. Read more >. The post Beyond VC: Funding Options for Early-Stage Startups appeared first on The Gust Blog.
Feld Thoughts
OCTOBER 25, 2017
A few weeks ago I was in Atlanta for Techstars Atlanta Demo Day and the Venture Atlanta Conference. I had a great time and it’s fun to see the vibrancy of the Atlanta startup community. My brother Daniel came with me and we had dinner with our cousin Kenny, who lives in Atlanta, so we got some nice, quiet, emotionally intimate family time. My favorite keynote at Venture Atlanta was from Scott Dorsey.
Duct Tape Marketing
SEPTEMBER 12, 2017
How to Conduct Your Own Total Online Presence Audit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Wondering why your prospects don’t find you on Google, or why your website doesn’t generate traffic and leads like you thought it would? How about why your competitors seem to show up for coveted keywords above you in search results? These are good questions that you should have the answers to.
Steve Blank
MARCH 8, 2017
Getting ready for our next semester’s class, I asked my Teaching Assistant why I hadn’t seen the posters for our new class around campus. Hearing the litany of excuses that followed –“It was raining.” (The posters go inside the building.) “We still have time.” (We had agreed they were to go up a week ago) — I had a strong sense of déjà vu. When I took the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy, excuses seemed to be our main product.
YoungUpstarts
AUGUST 23, 2017
When we look at successful startups we often focus on how the company has been successful with their end products or services but we often ignore what the founders went through and did to be successful. Like any other startups, those started by students often begin with ideas, but venture capitalists may dismiss the individuals as being young, inexperienced and naive.
Up and Running
OCTOBER 30, 2017
This article is part of our “ Business Startup Guide ”—a curated list of our articles that will get you up and running in no time! People often ask us for a list of steps they can use to start their own business. From business type to business model to physical location, there are so many variables! However, there are things that every business needs to do to get off the ground.
For Entrepreneurs
DECEMBER 6, 2017
I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks in my time at Matrix, and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other.
ConversionXL
AUGUST 31, 2017
At this point in time, the field is flooded with solutions. Finding a proper A/B testing tool isn’t the problem anymore. Now, the problem is choosing the right one. If you work in conversion optimization – whether at an agency, in-house, or as a consultant – you almost certainly run A/B tests. Though you could hire someone full time to sift through and analyze the pros and cons of each tool, it’s easier to learn from the experience of others and make a decision based on that.
The Next Web
JULY 27, 2017
The Copyright Reform that’s being discussed by the EU now, could crush certain type of startups when they reach the ripe age of three. “We know from entrepreneurs we spoke to that they would move their business outside of Europe if this law becomes a reality,” Lenard Koschwitz, Director of European Affairs at Allied for Startups, told TNW. The EU’s upcoming Copyright Reform is hotly debated, but most agree that the law needs to be updated and adapted to the digital age.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
APRIL 25, 2017
We’ve all laughed at detailed renderings of constellations overlaying a paltry set of stars that are in fact quasi-random. Like Fornax, which is just three stars: But which humans have no trouble rendering as an intricate sequence of machinery: It would be funny, if this natural compulsion didn’t also cause us to make bad decisions, all the time.
YFS Magazine
FEBRUARY 7, 2017
So many of us struggle with consistency. Here are 5 common reasons why you are not consistent in business and what you can do about it. This article Why You’re Not Consistent In Business appeared first in YFS Magazine.
Gust
AUGUST 15, 2017
So you’ve developed a game-changing product, formed a business with a killer team, quit your job, and are rolling the product out to market. Your business is the next unicorn, and all is good in the world. Fantastic. Now only one thing is inhibiting your company’s growth: you have no money. For many founders of high-growth startups, bootstrapping has limits.
Feld Thoughts
JUNE 13, 2017
Today Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) announced their support for Global EIR , a cause for which I care deeply. As you may know, over breakfast in 2015 Jeff Bussgang and I launched Global EIR with the hope of advancing the startup visa effort on a local and state level after it stalled in Congress. Since then, Global EIR has grown to 13 university programs across the country, helping 42 international founders start companies.
Duct Tape Marketing
APRIL 7, 2017
Why Small Businesses Have the Social Media Marketing Advantage written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing. As a small business owner, you’re constantly looking for new ways to get your company’s brand on the radar of potential customers. If you don’t already, using social media in business is a great way to engage with current customers as well as attract new ones.
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 28, 2017
When you’re up to your neck in alligators, don’t forget the goal was to drain the swamp. I love teaching because I learn something new every class. This time it was, “Don’t let process distract you from finding the strategy.”. The latest “aha” moment for me when I was at Columbia University teaching an intensive 5-day version of the Lean LaunchPad/I-Corps class.
YoungUpstarts
OCTOBER 27, 2017
by Paul Geiger, author of “ Better Business Speech: Techniques, Tricks, and Shortcuts for Public Speaking at Work “ Speaking in front of a group in any business setting, whether it’s a formal presentation, a meeting or on a conference call, requires not only that you have a well-prepared message, but that you deliver it clearly. Any number of glitches can sabotage your delivery.
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 15, 2017
Editor’s note: This article was updated in November of 2017. One of the best ways to prepare to conduct a SWOT analysis is to use examples for help and inspiration. Even if you already know what a SWOT analysis is and what it’s used for, it can be tough to translate that information and examine your own business with a critical eye. Reading an example SWOT analysis for a business that is either in your industry or based on a comparable business model can help get you started.
For Entrepreneurs
DECEMBER 13, 2017
Intro Many potentially great companies fail each year because, while they have an incredible product, they don’t figure out how to get it to market fast enough. Figuring out how to reach customers and break through to Product-Market-Fit remains one of the hardest parts of building a successful startup. This post introduces a four stage.
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